I have arranged to meet Luke at two when he comes off duty, by
the statue of Florence Nightingale, so I go home and have a shower
and
catch the bus. I like the tops of buses, now they’re non-smoking.
Like everyone else I hope for a seat at the front, perched above
the road, seeing fights in bedrooms and health inspectors in restaurant
kitchens and sex in offices, as the engines grumph and growl far
below. Once, on a summer day like this, a bus route was diverted
past the Museum. I looked up from where I was working, upstairs in
the drawing room, dusting a reproduction of one of John Harrison’s
clocks – the fourth that carried his name and his genius, the
one that was used by every navy frigate and East Indiaman to measure
out the oceans as well as measuring time – and saw not ten
feet from where I stood, white faces staring in at me. Was I phantom-like
in my plain dress and twisted up hair and white curatorial gloves,
standing in that perfect, eighteenth century room? From the bus,
they couldn’t have seen the alarm systems and smoke detectors
that run like nodes and capillaries under the panelling.
I am early. I skirt a pavement artist and prop myself against the
river wall and look across to the Houses of Parliament, another
Victorian ant heap. Behind
me is Florence Nightingale, cloth and flesh engineered and cast in bronze
so that she would still be there to glare at all those generations
of nurses they
were confident were yet to come. My watch tells me that Luke is late, but
my watch doesn’t know how much I am enjoying having some
un-counted minutes, a few breaths and heartbeats to stand here
in the sun, hearing the sparrows
and starlings chattering, and watching the endless glitter and shift of the
river.
For a while I watch the pavement artist, who has finished Princess Diana and
is lovingly drawing a cyborg. His chalk-sticks stroke her plates and sensors
and single camera-eye, curve round her lips and shoulders, pluck at her cables
and joints, and linger on her silicone-inflated breasts. At last he stops,
uses his fingers to airbrush the edges of titanium into her plump flesh, and
sits back on his heels to admire his creation.
